In watching the Oscar acclaimed movie “The Hurt Locker” which I saw at home and not at the theater, I was still on the edge of my seat for the entire duration of this movie in which you have this team of soldiers, this bomb squad, that is entrusted with the very difficult task of dismantling bombs in downtown Baghdad and the urban guerilla warfare surrounding them and it’s very challenging and all of the comrades of Sgt. William James are counting off the days that they have remaining for their tour of duty. And you totally get that, you totally understand that, to have made it through another day after encountering all of the dangers all about them after having dismantled yet another bomb was a real accomplishment. So you find yourself rooting for them, hoping for them, you have a knot in your stomach wanting these soldiers to make it through their tour of duty. So, it’s with some joy as a viewer that you watch as Sgt. William James then returns home to the states. But then you are surprised to realize that while he can overcome the intricacy of red wires and blue wires and black wires and timing devices on bombs he is no match for the Muzak and fluorescent lighting and the bewildering choice of breakfast cereals that awaits him at the grocery store. And having become systemically an adrenaline junky in the performance of his job during combat to come home to the anticlimactic, perhaps relatively mundane existence of just trying to raise a family and work a job was too much for him. The movie concludes when we see that he has returned to Iraq to serve yet another tour of duty to start the clock over again and start ticking off the days that he would have remaining. All of which says to me not all homecomings are happy not all relationships are restored or reconciled. What we have here in the Gospel of Luke this morning an example of a marvelous homecoming, listen carefully beginning with chapter 15.

Luke 15:1-3. 11b-32

15Now all the tax-collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.

²And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying,

This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’

3So he told them this parable:

Then Jesus^* said, ‘There was a man who had two sons.

¹²The younger of them said to his father,

“Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” So he divided his property between them. ¹³A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. ¹⁴When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. ¹⁶He would gladly have filled himself with^* the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. ¹⁷But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! ¹⁸I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; ¹⁹I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’ ” ²⁰So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. ²¹Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”^{* 22}But the father said to his slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; ²⁴for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” And they began to celebrate.

25‘Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. ²⁷He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” ²⁸Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. ²⁹But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. ³⁰But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” ³¹Then the father^* said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³²But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” ’

This is the Word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Barbara Brown Taylor says that the parable should more correctly be entitled ‘the parable of the dysfunctional family’. After all it’s a story of a weak patriarch, an absentee mother, two rebellious sons who seem intent on destroying the family property, the family farm, who seem to have no affinity for each other. And I suppose their claim has got merit. Wrestling with this parable this week it dawned on me this is not a blue print for parenting, you know.

My wife Sydney and I were watching that TV show this week, Super Nanny. And this week they managed to produce literally the kid from hell. I mean this is like Damian, this little boy. His mother was a single parent, 25 years old, two kids and he was spitting, biting, cursing, and kicking his mother. The Super Nanny was explaining to the mother that she needed to set firm boundaries and be very consistent as a parent. The scholars are quick to point out that when the youngest son, an ancient Israelite. First of all, in that culture and in that tradition the younger son does not even take the initiative and began speaking to the father unless they are spoken to. Secondly, for him to come up with the brilliant idea that the father needs to give him now that which he would be giving to him upon his demise was something akin to saying, dad why don’t you drop dead, so I can get what I got coming, now I want to convert it to cash. Thirdly, nine out of ten of the listeners would have been rural farmers and everybody knows that you hold onto your family land. That is priceless. You don’t go about carving up the family farmland. That’s what you pass on and you keep from generation to generation. So there is something very inappropriate and very impertinent and culturally inappropriate about the request of the younger son and yes it would have been totally appropriate and parental for the family patriarch to say “uh, I’ve got a better idea why don’t you go back to the back 40 and get to work and mow the lawn”. But instead incredulously the father does what he says, he caves in, he does these things that are not necessarily good for the son or good for the farm or good for the community. He gives into his wishes and I don’t know how to really process that except to again emphasize that this is not necessarily a blue print for parenting.

Parents are not called to enable or to give in to all of our children’s wishes. When we do that I think we inspire a culture of narcissism that is running rampant in our culture today. In which young people are taught the only thing that matters now, the only thing that mattered yesterday the only thing that will matter is ‘you’ and ‘your needs’. No rules, whatever you want you go out get it and God has conveniently furnished all of these other people and parents to bring you what you want. So it buys into the phenomenon it’s not good for them, it’s not good for us, it’s not good for parents, it’s not good for the civilization or the village or the community. When people only care about themselves and don’t worry about the implications or the consequences for the collective they just go out and get theirs. They don’t really worry about the implications. So I don’t think that we are called to give into that, in fact Larry McMurtry, one of our great national story tellers and a native of Texas, Archer City up there to the north. He wrote a book entitled Horsemen Pass By. The protagonist in this story is Hud Banner, who is a part of a dysfunctional ranch family and his father Homer despises him. He thinks all along it’s because he was in a tragic car wreck and in the car wreck his older brother, Norman, was killed. And so the story which was turned into the movie Hud staring Paul Newman, you see this simmering resentment going on between the father and son and it finally culminates with this dialogue which I took out of the movie.

Hud says, “Get it off your chest, what’s been griping you is what I done to Norman.” And his father says, “You were drunk and careless of your brother.” “Well you had ten years to get over it.” “Son, that’s never been our quarrel.” “The ‘heck’ it isn’t.” I paraphrase. “No, I was sick of you long before that.” “Well isn’t life full of surprises and all along I thought it was what I had done to my brother.” “Oh, I took that hard, but I buried it.” “Alright, what turned you sour on me, not that I care?” “Just that, Hud! You don’t care, that’s all, that’s the whole of it. You still don’t get it do you? You don’t care about people, you got all that charm and it makes the youngsters want to be like you and that’s the shame of it, ‘cause you don’t value nothing, you don’t respect nothing, you keep no check on your appetites, you live just for yourself and that makes you fit not to live with.” And Hud counters “Well my mama loved me, but she died.”

The youngest son takes his inheritance and converts it into cash and goes out and wastes it. Now we don’t know how he spent it. He just seemed to be very careless about it and before long he doesn’t have any money, he’s in a foreign land, he’s in a pagan pig raising land. And so he hires himself out and there he is feeding pigs which are ritually unclean for Jewish folks, so this is a very repugnant task and then he notices that the pigs are eating better than he is. And it dawns on him as he comes to himself we might say that the change of heart is really a change of mind as he gets smart and realizes he’s made some bad choices here. And so he makes another choice. He calculates that he has already forfeited his proper place in the family, but if he could just go back and his father would give him a job as a hired hand that would be better than this and he’s willing to do that. And so he begins the long journey to go back and put himself into position for being hired by his father. You notice he doesn’t expect restoration or reconciliation and being the person that has been lost and has initiated the breach, he’s really not in a position to initiate restoration.

And as we look at the parables that precede this parable the lost coin and the woman searching the lost sheep, the notion of lostness it is the seeker who initiates and brings about restoration not the entity that is lost. And so we have this marvelous moment of suspense in which he comes upon the scene; there’s the farm house, he’s still at a distance and you gotta know he’s wondering how he is going to be received. Because he’s not in control of that and we want to be in control, but he’s given that up. He cannot dictate to his father how he can be received. So he’s rehearsing his speech, ‘father I realize I’ve forfeited and I am no longer fit to be your son and I have sinned before you and before heaven, therefore, if you could’…see he is rehearsing all of that. When suddenly the door flies open and his father comes running down the road to meet him. Now ancient patriarchs are not supposed to run, it’s considered undignified. His father is not concerned about that, he’s not concerned about maintaining his honor or his dignity. Now one scholar did point out that when you abandon the family in the fashion that this one younger son did, you not only bring shame upon the family, you bring shame upon the village and the village has the right to have this ritual excommunication of you in which you will be shunned and banned from the village and some say that the father was running out to find the son before the village found him and could excommunicate him. The father wanted to embrace him and bring him back into the home and restore his relationship. So repentance is being redefined as restoration.

Did the younger son do all of the right things in his heart did he confess all of the things he had done, not necessarily. The father didn’t even wait to hear any of that. What did he do exactly, we don’t know. The older son was embellishing and skewing to the worst regarding his younger brother when he suggested that he spend all of his money on prostitutes. So they had a party. When we restore and reconcile relationships we have a celebration. And how you respond to that celebration will say a lot about how you understand righteousness and relationship. The older brother was highly offended that there was a party and a celebration because you see, he was going by merit; he was keeping score. His younger brother had abandon and left while he had set his clock and was ticking off the years, the months, the days, the hours, the minutes that he was slaving away toiling on the doggone farm when he didn’t even want to be there in the first place. But he was serving his tour of duty, doing all of the right things for all of the wrong reasons. And yet, when his younger brother this son of yours returns they throw a party for him. In refusing to celebrate the return of his younger brother the older brother indicts himself in his own sence of righteousness. He’s not going on mercy and relationship and God’s love and that’s really what this parable was told by Jesus to illustrate. God’s love goes by mercy and we say thank God for that today, do we not? Thank God, that we’re not going on the merit system that we’re not earning our way to righteousness that we’re not earning salvation, but it’s the gift that we have free to us in Christ. All we need to do is except the gift and live our lives accordingly and this is the great gift that we have. Bear in mind I am wrestling all week long with this image of returning to the farm, the prodigal son making his way through the corn fields and I saw this HBO sports special this week entitled Magic and the Bird. And it was a story about Irvin Magic Johnson and his fiercest basketball rivalry with Larry Byrd. Magic Johnson was raised in Lansing Michigan, he played for Michigan State but he got drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers and with that brilliant 50,000 watt smile of his, Magic fit right into Hollywood. It wasn’t long before he was driving around in a big limo with this specialized vanity license plate. ‘Show Time’ was the name of the LA Laker fast break offensive scoring machine but over here at the Boston Celtics you have Larry Byrd who was diving for rebounds and was just a lunch bucket type of guy. People in Boston used to love to go to his house on Saturdays and watch him come out and mow his own lawn. And when they met on the basketball court there was no love lost between them…a fierce rivalry. The Celtics won one year and the LA Lakers came and took the championship away. So there was this resentment and rivalry. Then the Converse tennis shoe company comes up with a great idea in 1985. Let’s have a TV commercial selling our tennis shoes featuring Magic Johnson and Larry Byrd, and they approached Johnson about it and Magic said “You’re crazy, I’m not making a commercial with that guy.” Then they went to Larry Byrd and he said “OK, I’ll make the commercial but I’m not going to Los Angeles, you gotta come to my house.” I imagine Magic’s agent had a talk with him and became agreeable to making the commercial, but when Byrd said my house he didn’t mean Boston. He meant go to French Lick Indiana to their farm house where he had built an extra house for his mom. All of his brothers lived around there and he had a full length basketball court built for himself. So as you watch the commercial you see this long black shiny limousine come around the corner on this farm road coming through the corn fields pulling up and there’s Magic Johnson getting out in his Lakers uniform. They’re going to have a show down on the basketball court. And then they of course sell the respective tennis shoe models. But they interviewed Magic Johnson and he said you know he didn’t know how it was going to work out. He made a stiff conversation and said to Larry Byrd, “Is that your tractor?” And he said “Yeah, I drive it every day.” Really, you drive a tractor every day? Yeah, I do. And Johnson said when it was over that he thought he would go eat lunch in his trailer and Byrd would go in his trailer but instead, “No, no you’re not going to do that, my mom’s fixed lunch for us up at the farm house.” They went up and had lunch together, and Larry Byrd met a guy named Irvin Johnson that had nothing to do with Magic, and they became fast friends. And their relationship was not restored or reconciled but it was created and so it wasn’t a homecoming but it was a pilgrimage in which they each learned and found a wonderful friend. Sometimes we have pilgrimages and sometimes we have homecomings and other times it doesn’t work out. You know on my desk I have a photograph of a 7 year old girl that was taken in 1956 in Chattanooga Tennessee, the sole of one of her shoes is built up, it’s larger than the other because she was born with one leg longer than the other and that’s how doctors dealt with that back then. It’s a picture of my oldest sister Janice. Janice went on to become the star of the family, she was the one who wrote the plays and recruited all of the kids in the neighborhood to put on the plays and she drove us through our parts and productions and she went off to college on a literature scholarship. But in 1978 she became a victim of clinical schizophrenia. And I returned home on leave from work to be there with the family as my father was dying of cancer and Janice was having all of these outbreaks of behavior. She was going out on the front lawn at 3:00 in the morning and lighting fires and she was terrorizing my mother and it was so hard on everyone as my father was dying. Well, once we got my dad buried I went down and signed the papers to have her institutionalized and examined and the prognosis was schizophrenia. As they were taking her away with her hands bound she stopped at the base of the stairs and she turned and looked at me and the look said it all, she said “I will never forgive you for this,” and she never has. It’s been 32 years I have never spoken to my oldest sister, the truth to the matter is even if I was to drive to Missouri and seek her out and find her she wouldn’t be there because that person is gone; has been taken from us by virtue of this dread phenomenon known as schizophrenia. So the picture on the desk is a reminder to me that you know that’s not going to happen…that restoration is not going to happen in this life, but in the next, in the next I will look forward to it. I want to conclude with these words that were read by the father character in A River Runs Thru It. The Presbyterian minister Rev. McLean, his two sons Norman and Paul upon the loss of his son Paul, he says “We are willing to help Lord, but what if anything is needed? Lord it’s true that we can seldom help those who are closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or more often than not the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who will elude us, but we can still love them, we can love completely without complete understanding.” Amen